Baratunde Thurston teaches AIA leaders “How to citizen"

AIA chapter leaders from around the country flocked to the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C., this week to connect on issues of advocacy and leadership at AIA’s annual Leadership Summit. 

On Tuesday morning, Baratunde Thurston, the writer, host of the podcasts "How to Citizen with Baratunde" and "Life with Marchines" and host of PBS’ “America Outdoors” addressed a packed ballroom for a keynote speech on the topic of “how to citizen”—that is, how to make “citizen” a verb.  

Drawing on his own experiences as the son of computer-coder mother in the 1970’s, as well as his own navigation of the isolation and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic, Thurston outlined his vision for solutions to some of the biggest issues facing American society today. 

“We have been living in a narrative of failure and dysfunction and despair and incompetence for too long,” he said. “We have been told we can’t get things done, that we don’t know how to choose our leaders or work together or have goals or have discipline or solve big problems. That’s a lie.” Through his work, Thurston hopes to disrupt this narrative and encourage everyone to take an active role in our society and democracy—to help everyone tell a different story. “’Citizen’ as a verb,” he said, “is much more invitational. [There are] things we can all do, regardless of our paperwork status.” 

According to Thurston, the substance of the “verb of citizen” has four key elements: 

Show up and participate. 

It’s important to show up and “assume there’s something for you to do,” Thurston said. “Just mentally orienting to ‘there’s something for me to do’ is a really valuable reorientation in a world that tells us we are without power.” Which leads, he said, to the second key element: 

Understand power. 

“We’re feeling power right now in harsh and careless and reckless and dramatic ways,” he said. “I think it’s a failure of our collective education system that we live in a thing called ‘democracy’ and we don’t study power.” The negative connotations of the word, Thurston said, do a disservice to those trying to understand its impact on our society. “Power is the ability to get someone to do what you want them to do,” he said, joking, “Babies are very powerful.” He clarified that power has many forms: physical, financial, the sharing of ideas, and the power of attention—whatever you give your attention to, you give power to. “Let’s be very thoughtful about what we give our power to,” he said. 

Commit to the collective, not just the individual self. 

Committing to the collective, Thurston said, “is easier if we see ourselves in each other.” Citing Valarie Kaur, the first guest on his podcast and the author of “See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love,” Thurston said, “A stranger is a part of me I do not yet know.” 

Thurston continued, “It’s very hard to do big, worthy things alone,” joking that during the Covid-19 pandemic, he tried to create his own vaccine but realized that he needed the help of scientists and other experts. 

Invest in relationships. 

Investing in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet around you, Thurston said, is the fourth most important way to “citizen.”

“We have been sold a story of separation at our own expense—that we’re here to dominate, to own, and to extract,” he said. “When we overdo that, we destroy the very home that we require to sustain life.” 

Thurston highlighted conversations he’s had for his podcast with leaders addressing the fallout from recent natural disasters, like the Los Angeles wildfires, including Chef José Andrés, the founder of World Central Kitchen. 

“The magic trick of José is that his organization just taps into the latent power and potential that’s already there,” he said. “World Central Kitchen is not a central kitchen—it is the most distributed kitchen in disaster relief ever assembled.” 

So many popular narratives are centered around a single individual carrying “the whole weight of society on their back,” he said, rather than the idea of a collective self, where many contribute to the greater good. 

“We need reminders that we are capable—that when leaders fail, the people must lead,” he said. “The best leaders are really just the first followers. They’re trend spotters, they see what’s going on and they respond to that. It’s up to the people to set the stage and the culture—the soil out of which our leaders and our institutions grow.” 

Going forward, Thurston encouraged his audience to envision an inclusive future, both for the profession of architecture and the country as a whole. 

“The story we tell ourselves about ourselves shapes who we are. Let’s tell a better and bigger story that encompasses us all.” 

Katherine Flynn is the editor of AIA Architect.